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User blog:Fire InThe Hole/WHAT UPDATE
Hmst A log/blog of sorts. Usually just about what I've done or intend to do, but also for personal things that affect my mood and activity. There's an archive for this stuff over here. Updaet #108 2020 02 13 Don't mind me casually missing three months. No substantial amount of file recovered. Ended up rebuilding and starting anew, in a way. Still haven't really gotten back into drawing. My room is still a pretty big mess, but I'm slowly settling into the whole thing. My meals are now roughly 50% self-prepared, whether that be a packaged thing warmed up or actual cooking. The other half is fries, freezer pizza and other easy meals. I intend to get a bicycle soon to make groceries and the like a bit easier; that's a big factor as to why I don't cook all my meals all the time. Now that I'm looking at it, there's lots of stuff to be done here still. I still have a lot of user subpages that are getting counterparts on the Fun-Ball wiki, and I haven't really continued the work I was doing on that mess. I'll work on it, slowly, but given how slow things have been on both sides of the ball, I'm not too worried about it for now. Writing story bits continues behind the curtains. I've got a lot of different things going on, but I'm trying to focus on the analysis part - what am I doing and why am I making these choices, and all that. But it's also a lot of backstory generation that depends on other information I don't always have at the ready of have to make up myself. Damn, this is hard. I'll get there. Always. Updaet #107 2019 11 18 After what seemed just a simple folder removal, it turns out I lost all the files on my laptop. Installing and running Recuva dug up lots of system files, but nothing that i actually needed. I'm more worried about college notes and useful documents as well as photos - my external HDD stopped interacting with my laptop a long time ago - though some digital art was also lost. Including something I had nearly completed, too, although I might have posted WIP versions somewhere. Until I conclusively find out if I can recover any files, I will have to work via phone and paper notebooks. All of this almost makes me forget that I've moved into a room now. There are still several boxes to sort out and I lack a few things, but the first day and night have been quite alright. Met the other tenant this morning, though I had already seen her a while before when signing papers and such. Unlike my predecessor I do like to sit and chat for a bit, and I'm pretty sure she's like that too. Got a little sympathy for my file disaster among other things. To be honest, I'd like to know what the deal is with my laptop and my files as soon as possible, so that I can start rebuilding afterwards as quickly as possible. At least I've probably got some of the Fan-Ball stuff on Google Drive, and anything I stuffed into Evernote is still here too. No stories or ideas were lost in that regard. I'll be drowning my sorrows... in music and drawings on teabag wrappers. I really do think this comic stuff could go somewhere. Updaet #106 2019 10 31 A number of bombastic and interesting things that I haven't mentioned yet. And older news, I suppose? My birthday was fun. Got one of those wooden posing puppets to practice stuff with. I plan to construct paper accessories just so I can figure out the perspective nonsense around a shitty bandolier I gave Delinius. If you go back a few updates, I finished the adventure that was Homestuck! Congratulations to me for finally going through that many years late to the party. Then again, I'm not sure where my past self would have ended up if I had known/actively pursued it when it was still new. We'll never know, unless one of my offshoot selves lives in the world where magic things happen. And even then he might not come see any of us. In hindsight I now see how relatively trivial all these little systems and things like a strife specibus become, since none of that holds together once you start bringing assets from your old universe into one that has been royally messed up from the start, and then resort to things that pry the system open and all that. SFANB is still likely to go nowhere, but in some ridiculous pocket of my mind I can continue to dream up stupid things now that I have given the source material a good read one time. One month further along the Fun-Ball train, some plans have changed, some random decisions made. I was going very heavy on bullet points here originally, but I've decided that it doesn't work nearly as well as I pretend it does. As for the mess that is my subpages, the Fun-Ball side is looking not as disastrous as it could possibly be, but I'm starting to doubt the need for a lot of these pages. Take the stupid timeline overview thing, for instance. While I was pretty proud of it when I first gave it a shape and thought I was doing well, I'm not so sure anymore now that I'm trying to rewrite it over to the Fun-Ball side of things. While writing this, though, I do realise that the original helped me establish what the hell a Delinius even is, and rewriting it is forcing me to pick up the mess and reshape it into something more plausible than it was beforehand. Hmm. I think I'll scrap the generic timeline overview page and relegate any and all of its notes to the Timelines portion of the Thoughtbox. The rummage bin, on the other hand, is excellent as my personal playground of interesting and fun things to scribble out until they look like they're making sense. The Thoughtbox is the (allegedly) serious or useful part, the rummage bin is just fun and games, though meant to create meaningful results at some point? The comparison falls apart the moment I make it. Now, I'm sitting on the fence again as to deleting obsolete subpages and blogs from this side, not because they are obsolete but because they are numerous and stupid in some cases. I technically can, but some of the priceless comment sections and talk pages already prevent me from snipping a handful. At that point, the entire exercise is pointless and I may as well not do it. If someone who is not me wants to advise me/give their thoughts, that might help me finally decide. For the moment, though, I might instead stuff the obsolete things under an archive tabber and slap on a caveat that these are the outdated versions of pretty much everything. I might even slap on a warning on each and every page, but the sheer amount of crosslinks I could possibly face- who am I kidding, I'm going to do this anyway, and I know it. The Thoughtbox was mentioned earlier, right? Well. I'm opening the can of durthworms, and I am going to skewer every last one with a metaphorical writing implement. Originally I thought it'd be far too difficult to split the project out over two wiki pages (too many crosslinks, perhaps?), and most of the older sources are here rather than on the Fun-Ball wiki. HOWEVER, as the Fun-Ball unfolds, bits of lore pop up left right and center, and it's weird to then link them back to here, if that makes sense. As for its passively interactive nature, that will be the domain of a blog page called the Babblebox. Anything that I am particularly curious about will appear there, and probably most people will reply to them over Discord instead, but that's fine. (Just now this reminds me of some ridiculous scheme I successfully pulled off for some other community, so I'll write about that part as well in a moment.) Anyway, the Babblebox will be the place where I set up things that I'm particularly curious about. The Thoughtbox will be what it says on the tin: a place where I arrange what I know, from old (sub)pages and blogs, or from Discord conversations. At this point it doesn't matter from which side they came so long as I keep track of confirmed/unconfirmed stuff. Here's what I'll do with the Thoughtbox. *Main page stays where it is (here), though the Fun-Ball clone might eventually become a full copy, crosslinks included. It's not that hard, given that it's just a string of characters tacked onto the start of the link. I constantly fall into this trap of thinking "too much work" and I hate it. *I will move the various subsections from here to there and cross-link them accordingly, subsequently deleting them here. In the moving process, some portions will be split out (I now have a "Ludus" and "Prism" section, with the latter being more about general concepts and species n such, while the Ludus covers the actual specifics of the planet and what its inhabitants do.) I hope this will make it tidier than it was, but I have a sinking feeling that it won't. *While it's on the move it will obviously gather more material (in fact, that's already the case) but I think I'll manage. *I am well aware how behind the curve I am compared to my hopes and dreams on that whole project, but that is how it goes with all of my ambitious lore documentation plans. I am somewhat surprised that it's still in the 'salvageable' field rather than the 'please just burn this and forget about it' one. Right, the ridiculous scheme. For a year and a half now, I've been part of a bunch of Discord servers around Madness Combat, one of them housing an entire RP subsector that has since split off to be its own thing. Now, on the one hand I've come to appreciate a lot of the people there, but on the other they easily trump some of the incidents that happened here with the volatile bunch that reside in there. This includes October 2015, if it is any indication. There's always talk about what is 'canon', given that we've got a line of Flash animations, a Flash game, and some cool 3D remake/reimagining of that game (releases on Steam soon, but I have the beta) - and combined with a few particularly precise people that makes for some impressive clashes over lore. Over the course of my time with this silly if sweet bunch, I've come to resent some of the unreasonable clashes that happened, until one day I bitterly remarked how I'd drop a document on everyone's head just so that these lore discussions would stop being so violent and heavy. When one of the participants present seemed genuinely interested in assigning me a 'lore master' role of sorts, I decided to do exactly as I had threatened and made a document. And surprisingly enough it went well. So well that I gave the people involved a compliment. They had been bickering just moments before, but they got over that really fast. The document has now spun way out of control and is actually shaping up to be a decent reference for everyone to use, though it still needs a lot of work. Most of that work is up to the other people and I can now sit back and watch them cooperate. It's weird, but oddly satisfying. Then there's all the artwork, finished, planned or in progress. I'm consciously trying to nudge my style out of 'lines for eyes' territory a little bit, mostly by fattening up the lines so I can get around to eye colours. Little curves suggesting eyelids are optional and I'm not sure if I can do them well, but ideally the result comes to resemble that new artwork for Nina as it appears on the page now. The eyes, that is. Ironically this also steers it a little more towards half the humans in the HS comic but that's... not a consciously chosen similarity, at least. Finishing up the Homestuck read has also given me more vague inspiration that'll sift through my head and create ideas, I'm sure. Real life people have been telling me that I should draw comics for about a year now, after they saw the drawings I make. Will I? I might, but I'd use the far-future nonsense I've built around Delinius rather than the regular major events, at least until we've got those sorted out. Now the last thing is also the most interesting, or at least the most significant. I'm getting a room. Frees up halfway through November. This will entail some moving work and a lot of "how to household", and self-discipline. Especially this last thing I'm not very good with, but by forcing myself to take care of the mundane household stuff, I think I've got a chance at bringing myself to study independently. There are lots of things that change about my day to day. Fewer long-distance train trips, for instance. Less trouble with staying up late and waking up the other people in the same house, and no mutual frustration between me and my parents about the things we cannot stand about ourselves and each other, but I'll probably get along just fine with them once I'm out. I'll find my way. Updaet #105 2019 10 01 Tomorrow my existence on the Fan-Ball wiki turns 7 years old. That's neat. In a few more days (Oct 4th), my own existence celebrates 21 years. Huh, one third of my life I've at least known this place. But today the Fun-Ball wiki has been 'officially' revealed. This was what MMTeaser.png was all about. I was in on the secret a little earlier, which has allowed me to prepare/work on subpage migration to some extent. So here's the beans. *I am way too scatterbrained to safely maintain two duplicates of one page. *Further complications arise with images that need to be present on two sides. *Something about workload distribution between study and leisure. *Fun-Ball explicitly allows for story stuff to appear in mainspace. All of this means the following: *The story-related subpages and blogs I maintain already are or soon will be copied to Fun-Ball; the Fan-Ball versions will not be updated further, so I will add links to Fun-Ball counterparts. The Fan-Ball subpages and blogs will not be deleted, now or ever. They are user subpages and blogs, after all. Eventually they will be super outdated. **Re: Thoughtbox, if I will work on it at all, it will still be here, because here is where the old material is. HOWEVER, Fun-Ball is probably where the big storystuff discussions will take place from now on. **Any active thinking about the characters I've created will likewise be on Fun-Ball rather than here, unless old pages here are in some way involved or the place where discussion takes place. *I think the idea for the future is that all the story content in mainspace will be fully moved to the other side, but for now I won't be doing any of that. I will copy over any relevant stories I hadn't copied yet. *In Evernote I have a separate stack of text note folders under 'Fun-Ball'; I still have the source code of all the Fan-Ball pages in the Fan-Ball stack, just in case. *This Updaet blog will remain on Fan-Ball, the only real difference being that it now tells about things on the Fun-Ball wiki as well as things here. This reinforces what Ludicrine has said: Fun-Ball is just here to house all the story content, and I don't perceive any real division forming between the two sites once everything is sorted and transported. As to my birthday: still having to decide where I want to eat, figuring out which headphones my grandmother will give me for my birthday, and other things. Otherwise there's not really anything for birthday gifts that I actively want, which is frustrating and sad. I have made drawings, as usual. *Finally, a lone Maintenancekeeper that looks good in the drawing. *Landscape oriented drawing depicting Perdax, the Maintenancekeeper and Hellen as some kind of adventurous trio. *Hellen without a helmet. *Ariadne with slightly more faithful spider features. *Better artwork for Maltus. *Some f®iends for Neuerberg. *Attempted revisit of the Phlogistomantic Enforcer and the Lightbringer, futuristic and slightly implausible weapons I designed a long time ago. **Lightbringer: The old drawing had some major design flaws that I didn't see until I looked at the thing some years later. The trigger is now placed properly IN FRONT of the grip, the 'energy storage cell' is now embedded into the stock in a non-obstructive way, and the overall shape and design is a lot cleaner. It has become slightly longer but thinner, more or less. The strange electronic bits sticking out have been made less of a mess, and there's now a switch to power the laser pointer that's been placed above the barrel. **Phlogistomantic Enforcer: I did a lot to change this up. ***The revolving thing that supposedly contains miniature rockets or missiles looked weird and was poorly drawn, though the concept of the weapon was and remains badass. Now the projectiles and the barrel are both a fair bit beefier (though still small for rockets or similar), and the cylindrical thing is now just four tubes in a diamond arrangement around a central axis. In addition, the weapon now has a big break-action latch that allows for easier projectile insertion. However, the whole barrel plus tubes assembly is probably quite heavy; reloading would probably take its owner (Delinius) quite some time. ***The rails above and below the barrel looked nice, but I couldn't quite bring them along in the redesign. The break-action thing already messed with it, and it only got more difficult as I proceeded. Ultimately, I managed to fit in a small rail underneath the front end of the barrel where it lacks grips or other extra material that would reinforce it otherwise. **The vent holes have changed shape; there's also a small handle on the stock that can be tilted to either side to slide a plate in front of the vents on one side, or neither. This is not truly a safety feature (though it could have been): rather, Delinius might slide it to either side (depending on how he even holds the thing) when using the thing's scope, since he doesn't want a face full of smoke and flames if he's trying to be a little more precise. He doesn't use it when just wildly firing at the opposition, though. Probably an unbalanced exhaust output would cause balance and aiming issues there. **I'm still toying around with it a little, but I'm mostly satisfied. Little things like the Flameypaint ™ will stay, because they are cool. I might further deepen this out along with the Hades Harbinger, which you will find under my Fun-Ball subpages in the Armory (Fun-Ball). Updaet #104 2019 09 11 Oof. Bit of a controversial date innit. Regardless. *University resumes once more. It goes one. *Been working on Back to the Mainland as well as a lot of character thinking work. *Thoughtbox is on hiatus for various reasons, though there's a few tidbits I've got to go and put in places they belong. *Doing some things in relation to MMTeaser.png/the countdown it is mounted above; all a big :3c. Otherwise, I've been working on some neat and/or interesting aspects of Dwin and the religion around the deity, including artifacts to mimic the Creation Trio... except these will mostly be 'divine gifts' that may be useful but are by far not as world-changing as the Chaos artifacts, and tend to have inherent dangers or drawbacks to using them. Specifically toasting their wielder along with the enemies. There's also an old 'traffic jam' drawing from years ago that I'm tackling the digital version of, but I've also been playing a lot of a game called MechWarrior Online, which uh, is fun. Too much fun. Let's look at the previous update for stuff I wanted to do. *Pet mess is still a problem. *Thoughtbox subsections, eh. Awaiting REDACTED to be revealed so I don't have to deal with separate info streams. *I have since sat down to ask LAT about Martedians and I'm pretty sure I noted the things down into the Thoughtbox. *Unnamed Martedian might have a proper place within Back to the Mainland, but that doesn't get them a name. *The holiday drawings are (mostly) going to be the 'main' outfits of various of my beans, at the least for Delinius. I have scanned most of them but missed one or two; I do have a decent photo though so it's all good for digital editing. *The Hideaway only needed one thorough read before posting to edit anything that didn't work, though that was also a pretty lengthy session. Further plans are under the wraps of REDACTED which is annoying, but in 19 days it'll make sense why I'm having to do this. Updaet #103 2019 08 10 Alright, I'm more or less back into my usual. Aside from slowly picking up the study pace for when August ends, here's some things. *I will get to the pets mess. Dammit, past me! You could have done this long ago but now I'' have to deal with it. *Some updates to be made to various Thoughtbox subsections and/or expansion of the ones that were incomplete before I left. **Saga is go; I've specifically asked Mori about this and the point of Saga is that it is a community timeline. I will still not hijack development any more than I already do via this project. **Mu??? **Reminder to sit down and ask LAT about Martedians; I have to re-read my notes to actually compose the questions so that I'm doing something meaningful. Society, tech and general history are roughly what I'm curious about, but every bit of lore I can put together is valuable. **Small fixes in various places; I will turn the combat subsection into a more informative blog version eventually but it's not high priority for now. *A while ago, I made an interesting 'family lineup' ft. Delinius/Lyka, their daughters and lastly Raff. Desert Air and The Hideaway have been on my mind a bunch, I guess. Now armed with some more interesting/outlandish outfits from my holiday drawings, I went about doing that again. While inking the pencil lines over with pen was a disaster, I'm really happy with how it worked out. I might be able to scan and showcase this and the holiday artwork next week when I visit my grandmother again. Network scanning/sending is still a no over here. *The unnamed Martedian design is complete; I am satisfied with that one too and it got a 'rad' from Luka so that's neat. I'll be scanning/showcasing that in the big art gallery of ''Floppy artworks too. I don't have a name for them or much characterisation but I intend to do something with this one. **On that note, I also had another Martedian design with a 'common fly' sort of aesthetic ages ago, which I might try to redo eventually. I have no idea where either Martedian will end up, but I know I want to do something with these characters. *The Hideaway is already complete. Just like Desert Air, I'll be putting it up piece by piece, forcing me to inspect each segment I add as well as everything before it. This helped squash lots of bugs last time, so I'm sticking with this method. At 'only' ~17,000 words, it's a little over half the length of the previous thing. To imagine that both stories were roughly present in the first version of Desert Air. That would've been a really long read, wouldn't it. Updaet #102 2019 07 31 Whew. I'm home. You can read the separate journey log via the link below. For now I'm just settling back in and unpacking; tomorrow I might start doing some site stuff via laptop. First order of business is the mess that is pets. Meanwhile, though, have the creative harvest of this month. Six illustrious figures in slightly more 'exotic' attire *Katherine (desert merchant... kind of) *Helena (some kind of rogue-y outfit? Iunno, it looks nice) *Raff (made a second and better sketch later on; body warmer + coat combo slightly inspired by the veteran ranger coats of Fallout: New Vegas, without particular resemblance otherwise) *Ina (really pleased with the hair and overall feel of her coat) *Delinius (made a second and better version for this before the take two for Raff; ended up skipping shoulder pads on this occasion in favour of other cool things) *Lyka (overall rather simple outfit; might dabble with digital pencils to add more details, something which I should have considered ages ago) I'm not sure if I ever showcased a vague idea for residents of a large island/tiny continent called Pata, but the 'maybe nymph subspecies' has antler-like growths that have leaves and flowers on them as if they were tree branches. They might actually be small plants depending on what I want with the lore. I made a... decent drawing of one, just to have a proper example. The lastly there's a Martedian i cobbled up while waiting for boarding the flight home. Well, the first part of that journey. I'm still working on little bits of attire (footwraps and the like). I have no idea if it's a good design, but it works out well enough. If all goes well enough it'll go up for an upload. It's good to be home. Now to pick up the mess I had to leave behind before the trip. Sub-updaet #101b 2019 07 11 - 2019 08 01 Technically only until the 31st, but August 1 is the earliest I'll remotely be doing anything site-based on my laptop because there's some administration stuff I'd normally have done exactly during these three weeks. Like, uh, university stuff. It's important and looming in the distance. Everything up to then should mostly be chronicled in the page linked in the heading. Sub-updaet #101a 2019 07 10 Tomorrow I depart. I'm a little bit nervous because I've done the majority of my packing in one evening, which could entail some forgotten things that I won't be able to retrieve or arrange in the morning. I do have the digital camera and peripherals, I do have the papers in order and stored safely. As far as uncertainty goes on hotel wifi time: my parents seem intent on relaxing at least as much as visiting notable places, so that this doesn't become a hasty holiday so to speak. This'll slightly bump my availability and check frequency, but not much; I'm likely going to spend time on other things than just my phone. The shirt I'm wearing tomorrow says it all: the adventure awaits. Updaet #101 2019 07 01 Writing this as I cross over into July. Rewriting it now that I'm actually in that month. Time shenanigans aside, there's something I hadn't mentioned at all until now. I'll be on the second 'big' holiday travel of a lifetime (read: outside Europe and surroundings) to Indonesia, similar to eight years ago when I first laid eyes upon this here wiki. The four luminous adventurers are my mother, bonus father (step- having a slightly negative connotation in Dutch, for some reason), my grandmother, and I. Just like eight years ago. It won't be the cheapest at all, but that's what we've been saving up for. I'm definitely excited a bit and we're leaving in less than two weeks. Getting things in order has been slightly rushed as a result, but we'll get there. As for Indonesia itself, much will have changed compared to eight years ago. What news I've picked up over the years didn't seem the most encouraging, but since we're staying out of tourist hot spots I don't think there's much to worry about. We aren't oblivious blunt tourists either, which helps. I also have some less fond memories of the 2011 visit because my father was suddenly also there without mentioning it - right around the very start of the debacle that was and is my stepmother. At least he will not likely be there at all - he's got his happy new household and family to run, as far as I know. After some consideration and advice I'll be leaving my laptop at home, too. Plenty to do out there instead, and I'll still have my phone. So what's all this going to mean? *We're going to be there until the end of July. I'll probably be up and running again by the second or third of August. *I will probably not be doing much site-related things other than a bit of text writing on my phone. Edits if any at all would just be some housekeeping on my own subpages. *Maybe I'll go find dotpict, come to think of it. A mobile drawing app could spark all sorts of things. *Mobile Discord all the way. *I'm not sure how often I will have wifi, but hotels tend to have networks around those parts. More importantly I don't think I will be in those hotels themselves outside of sleeping and breakfast times. On that note, it's a fairly large timezone shift (+8 or even +9, I think?) but I was already out of sync with anyone on the other side of the Atlantic anyway. But all that is the (near) future. Some things of right now/the (recent) past: *Study-wise I'm screwed, but I have acquired a strange calm about the whole mess that is sorting out discipline issues alongside problems with (self-)trust. Once I turn 21, I'll get around to crossing my biological dad off the list of things that disturb my day to day by writing to him about all the things that have deranged my life over the course of... eight years, just about. *Currently in a phase of drawing art with slight experimentation; I went back and looked at some artwork for Delinius and Ina by LAT, then tried to work with the hair style on there. Unsure where that will go, but a slight redesign might slowly form out of that. Moreso for Ina than Delinius because I'd have to redraw or delete all those older drawings because Ina's overall design never really developed into anything more defined until recently anyway. **On that note, one of the other students of my singing coach has taken a liking to the things I draw; the reason for this is that it reminds slightly of Japanese comics/animations, which is fine. I've been getting more (positive) comments on drawings from folks around me in general. It does help that my current sketchbook travels with me more or less everywhere I go (sitting next to my laptop as of right now), to be flipped open for any length of waiting. **Something early on from HGD's journal (see next paragraph): I've been toying with some things in my head about that dream I had. I should probably start sketching it a bit. I might also dare to be a garbage imitator and make some dotpict depictions (or is it dotpictions), but there's a fair chance this will go nowhere. There's also a new journal entry from HGD, some of which references stuff I have had a hand in. Here's some replies/responses, if that's how it works? *My bad on the troll/fake threat bit. I've since also written that on the Lifestones page itself before finishing this up. *I've spotted what's up with the profane category; if that's to be renamed/tackled I'd be willing to help, but that would be in August at its earliest because I do not trust mobile editing quite enough to handle anything like that. *I am happy to hear the somewhat good news on the glaucoma treatment, and I wish HGD well on the upcoming travels. Kind of funny how that timing ended up. *Whoops, I really did kick up a necrostorm. That's my bad, too. The Thoughtbox evolved out of my realisation that necropost comments are not a good way to track blog posts. And about the Thoughtbox! I've actually gone and completely reorganised this section to be in sync with the journal post, for the sanity of all involved. I might accidentally switch to directly addressing HGD here and there; please forgive me. *I had not thought as highly of my Thoughtbox project, but it does serve as a hub I suppose. Making a centralized 'canonity' page is a goal I could help pursue once I've got all the subsections sorted out. *Archiving the old Alpha stories into Alpha-Archaic might not be so archaic; you might have read about the state of its original inventor. While I'd be fine picking up the work since it's a community timeline, I am aware that I can be rather loud and imposing in how I go about my things (see the necrostorm) and I feel like I'd be ripping Saga from Mori's hands, which I do not want to do. Doing the Alpha-Archaic thing could let everyone sandbox around with Alpha reworks and rewrites while Mori... I dunno, sorts out whatever it is that goes on. It's not something I want to ask since she hasn't mentioned any of it as far as I'm aware. If someone does have some info, feel free to enlighten me. *Soft-lock is pretty much what goes on yes. The Incredubious Industrial was left locked in a similar way while HGD was in service, and I'll be leaving it as-is for now. Especially with what rework some stories require earlier along the chronology it's not something I was focused on anyway. *Article per timeline or timeline-per article reminds me of a (scrapped) plan I had to work on the outlines of Pi(e); I could certainly recover it from the trashcan and see what I can do. Whatever the case, knowing that this idea exists means that I'll outline everything I know of each timeline's happenings as shortly as I can, and maybe do some magic with links to specific paragraphs on other pages. Tab view sounds very cool, but also possibly scary and difficult with anything I don't own. *Right, Discord. I had pretty much expected that it might be a little direct for someone who is slightly anxious and maybe more reclusive (? Correct me if I am wrong since I am no psychologist), which plays into why I started copying discussions to my notes and eventually into creating the Thoughtbox. Joining into the thing is up to you (HGD), since these Discord-based discussions need to be consolidated into actual text anyway. There are plenty of ways to tweak Discord's settings to make it as low in noise as possible that I could detail if needed. **For everyone: I probably cannot do this whole transcription thing alone, even if we don't continuously discuss story bits; scatterbraining aside I'm juggling a lot of pastime and not-pastime things, more so than last year. If anyone else has some things they could pluck from Discord and put together on a blog post, comments here, or even just my talk page, that'd help. Discord direct messages would work out fine too. If it's in one place it's all good. *As for the modding scene, that's its own can of worms or rather a separate 'server'. While the Dan-Ball server certainly has its nice folks, the population is a bit of a mixed bag. *I love the mockshot; I think I've sent up an exported text with some thoughts about the underlying plot at some point soon after I saw it. *And indeed, on that ball, the troll redesign. I'm just as fine with the 'less direct crossovers' mentality, but I would like to not pile the redesign/revision all on the one user who has to do it. What little I know about existing plans will be in the 'characters' subsection of the Thoughtbox. If there's anything else I can do, say the word. I think the idea of an advanced game that does things to a planet is salvageable, but that's just me. *Ah, yes, content moderation. I still can't rename my blogs to lift them from blogspace, but instead I can copy them onto a user subpage and subsequently delete the blog, fixing links left and right as needed. *Ah yes, Marco's Moon Mod. I've complimented him over Discord too, I think. Ruscell is also very nice, and really does remind me of the classic gambling-themed animated pets I know and love. *Re: Stats v2 I will proceed to be lazy about renaming anything I upload from 'Stats2_charactername' from here on out, but I will also not rename any of the graph's I've uploaded under different names since. Maybe I'll get on it in August. Maybe. I have been messing with stat revamps for characters not owned by me on a regular Google Doc. Saves me from uploading twenty versions of a document, I guess? Baxter/Samuel/Sam's offspring have had some input from their respective authors/'owners' while the remainder are just educated guesses at most. *I've gone over the category name, and I'll leave the Keanublogs for what they are as it is. The same more or less goes for some of the users and uncoolness stemming from some. We can keep the blunderbuss in its box for now. *The ancient community-based pages could use a dust cleaning for sure, but I'm likewise not in the mood to create such a hub for a community as small as ours is. What little experience I've had with threads reminds me of Twitter and article comments for varying reasons, so talk pages it is. That's three votes against, more or less. Some comments on creative works on my end, too! *I am definitely enjoying Desert Air too, and I want to explore how ageless and long-lived figures like Delinius experience their interactions with mere 'mortals'. The follow-up is not thought out entirely either, but the question of Raff's past has been in my head too. How I want to write the actual story, well... journal entries seem to becoming a recurring theme more and more, and actually writing all the things they get up to is probably less cool than writing about them indirectly. *This reminds me of some loose thought somewhere theorizing that Hankvi could live for many more sweeps than your average Ludusian. I'll go find where that went; perhaps this could spell some adventures of the purple troll in later times but that's a story for another time. *Drawings-wise I won't be doing much for the next days until the departure, though I do have a digital Perdax on the shelf coming along nicely, and as mentioned I'll look into sketching Wau!Hank, current or otherwise. *I'm also thinking about exploring artwork of non-Gridmasks, which is pretty much all I have done so far. Ariadne is a mixed case, as is the Martedian test thingy based off of an anatomy image from LAT, which I've never uploaded on-site I think. **'Delini Langza'. Possibly with an avatar swap to pick up on Hank InThe Hole from? 2016 I think. We'll get there. Updaet #100 2019 06 05 Might as well - this is number one hundred. Well, well. Some notes. *Exams and papers ahoy - if you have something you need me for, best start poking at me soon before I force myself to stay away from FB for a little bit. *Speaking of paper, I scanned more than 30 little drawings of wildly varying quality and relevance. The most relevant ones (29 of those) should be up in my Drive for now. Some of them will end up uploaded on-site, but I'm looking towards uploading the paper art less than the digital, especially since I rarely find enough time or will to colour them all in. *Not much movement on the Thoughtbox right now, but will revisit soon enough. *Likewise, I have to do something about the pages for Lyka and Caldeus, and add/complete pages for Helena and Katherine. The latter two are in the works while the former two are suffering a lack of ideas/creativity a little bit. *These folks are a relatively new idea that spun off of a spontaneous drawing of 'Perdax' Danvei, one of the Maintenancekeeper's friends. I'll get to that artwork later. They're mostly there just for flavour text, and might be featured here and there whenever the Maintenancekeeper himself is in the mix. **Loose thought I had at some point - The Maintenancekeeper is a bit like me, in some weird meta sense, because we're both trying to create interesting and good paths for various versions of Delinius. *Desert Air is doing fine; I'm deliberately uploading it in little bits so I keep rereading and reshaping ever so slightly. If this pattern continues I might not even have to give it a post-publication rewrite at all! *I have not forgotten about Back to the Mainland OR The Great Mailman War, but I'm currently not getting ideas for either, which is sad. *I'll compose a list of story lorebits to check for relevancy at some point - this is mostly a note to myself. Semi-related: the uni's printer system has been replaced. I got my boatload of drawings scanned in just before they finished the replacement process, so I'll have to see how user-friendly this new system is. Getting printing credit is more independent but also more troublesome via a mobile app (Skuario); I don't like paying stuff through something as loose as a phone. I am also one step further in the process of sorting out some past problems that will let me deal with present problems as well (piss-poor discipline and work ethic for my actual studies, that is). And while this Updaet #100 is a bit of a milestone in itself, I just dug through the logs and figured out that I've already passed May 14 - the five year mark of me actively doing things here. It's kind of strange and funny at the same time to read into some of the dumb things I started off with, then compare them to some of the slightly-less-dumb things I am doing now. Updaet #099 2019 05 11 Well hello there. Normally I don't remember to write this monthly, but with the increased activity around I actually have some things to write down. First, though, I had a strange dream bit about artwork, apparently Wau!Hank. It'll become clear as I describe what features I remember. *Much of the surroundings was red; apparently some tall buildings were blurred by fog or similar and the buildings themselves seemed somewhat stylized/off-shape. *Some kind of red stream that wasn't blood more or less separated the foreground in two equal halves; might have been a gargantuan mess of red cables with some white ones in between? Alternatively just reflections from an indeterminate light source. *Hankvi looking... worried perhaps? In any case, a description text came with this that was talking about cutting off horns, and something about curves that seemed to make sense to my dream brain but which I can't quite get my waking brain to recap. If I remember right the horns weren't cut off yet but given that they seemed not their usual, he might be in the process of getting rid of them. I'm not sure what the red theme of the image was supposed to be for. I do know that I was listening to music as I fell asleep (Black Plastic from Savlonic) so maybe there's something to be found there. I believe this really is what they call inspiration, which answers a years-old question about dreams that I hadn't forgotten yet. So much for the dream bit, off to other things that I know a bit more about. I've been inspired by the OMNI Task Manager, so I'm telling myself to organise my plans a bit as well. Said taskmgr has my attention and there are a few more things I can give meaningful input on. I'm not sure to what extent I can help with the actual tasks especially in sitecode things, what with my limited CSS/general coding knowledge, but it's there. Actual plans ongoing or intended: *Cleanup of my subpages and various blogs; Wikia FANDOM still doesn't let regular user me move blog pages. Some work's already done (/Stories/Timeline overview), some is up for debate (merging the remaining 'regular' and 'detailed' overview, but having thoughts against it). Some defunct but still valid subpages need to get merged, probably into a loose scraps page. Alternatively... *...a 'Thoughtbox' subpage that contains many links, mostly to all sorts of loose blog pages with story things though I might dedicate a section of it to the fan ideas and pets sides of the site once the main goal is reached. It's mostly for my own usage/reference. This might get that *Once all the materials are listed so I don't have to dig through lists of blog pages and search queries, I'll start putting various ideas next to each other and/or try to put together something to connect ideas. None of it needs to be 'canon', it's just the next step in having a bunch of story lore ideas together in one place except from multiple users instead of just me. *Potentially I'll root through Discord (and I've got some things copied to a document somewhere) so that all manner of conversations about this can get their attention too (properly credited of course). *Just extended a little blog post to the Dan-Ball Wiki, a thoughtbox quite similar to the one intended above, just to get a few people up to speed as to what's going on and hopefully get more meaningful info. As a heartwarming sidenote, Ivan247 added a link to us as a sister site just recently. Other than that, I'm probably missing a lot of preparation on the papers that lie ahead, but that's a bridge I'll have to cross another weekend. Updaet #098 2019 04 10 Two months! Hooray. Anyway. Personal-lifey-wise, I've still got plenty of inner demons to fight. But I'm fairly sure I've crunched a few of the smaller ones and turned their remains into pulp. Site-wise: *See the Hia-logue 5. First thing to note. *Some elaboration is in order on my plans for story things. ---- Air, desert air: So this 'Air, desert air' thing is a working title. Likely some of that will stick in the definitive title. In addition, it's approaching a size where I might split it out into two (>20,000 words? What am I even doing?), since the current shape is likely not staying as I give the context a clearer shape. It is, as it stands, a functional story, but there is a lot that is left unexplained and I'm fairly sure there are holes to rebuild it around. The story takes place in 960 AEQ. Delinius and Lyka have long since retreated to a hidden place on Faeric. But they're not the most important. Enter Katherine. Since 949, she has been forced out into the world: while she has been responsible for a library ever since the 8th century AEQ, it has gone up in flames. The culprits and their motives are unclear, but there's no shortage of people that might want to destroy 'forbidden' knowledge or just want to see the world burn. As such, she works as a travelling antiquarian and merchant of trinkets. It's her only means of providing herself with decent income. After a rough decade, she has finally gathered enough wealth that she can board a tourist caravan across the desert. The trip takes long; I'm not too sure on the scale of Ludus, but I'll likely not describe every single day as it stands. Suppose it's several months. In that time period, she encounters a stray Gridmask who is running away from a short past that he'd rather forget. Like any other Gridmask, he doesn't really understand what it means to have lived for three centuries. Unlike them, he is not only able to see that something is 'off' about this exotic antiquarian, but then puts his finger on it and discovers the truth. Katherine, in turn, is initially a little irritated by this young man who doesn't fully realise yet what he's stumbled upon. But as they travel among brainless tourists who cannot stand the idea of sand in their clothes, she comes to appreciate someone actually listening to her stories. Shenanigans with stupid tourists occur, and I might involve Delinius' old mansion in it along with a small town that has formed next to it. The ultimate goal of Katherine's journey is the parental home. Her newly found travelling companion doesn't have a clearly defined goal, only looking to run away from something. Katherine realises that he presents something unusual: after a certain point in time, ordinary Gridmasks became unable to properly identify her and the rest of her family as anything more than eccentric. This lad isn't affected by it, apparently. So she takes him under her wing, ultimately presenting him as a potential risk to her family's status as not being there at all - and at the same time he is the first 'outsider' she can share something with. This combination of factors leads to an interesting approach by Delinius when this information becomes available. ---- Wrath of the Sunbird: Title's changing soon. Story's changing massively too. And more specifically, there are events to take place between the above and this; I'm not sure which things I'll write out, and which ones I won't. I can tell you that I've created a crude timeline of when and why Neuerberg came into existence, and that's about all I can toss around for now. Alexander/Lex' existence is debatable but let's say he's just going to be that one figure who makes contact between two segregated social layers. ---- Upsilon? While I'm burrowed in a bunch of university work, the recent expansion on what the Upsilon timeline is like has caught my eye (and brain) for a little while. I'm not entirely sure where this'll go with the distant ideas I had for Upsilon Delinius' life, but expect something about the sun over there. Updaet #097 2019 02 01 HOOBAH. See below under this post for misery, see this post for misery. I recently saw a lovely thing on some street corner: a spray painted message "HEAD DOPE - DEAD HOPE". Which is not interesting because it relates to me, but the letter hustling is real. (That is not how hustle works, but I do not care.) Other news. No exams passed. But my writing assignment is done and hopefully will be sufficient. Not excellent, but sufficient. I'm not a scientist and I will never be. Fucking conventions, fucking rulebook of writing. God. Other other news: *What's below, basically. *Air. Hot desert air, dry and sweltering. You could probably swim in your sweat around here. Some of the other travellers, dressed more with fashion that practicality in mind, too stylish for this expedition, were using large wide hats and hand fans in an effort to stay cool. Maybe it was all just a show for each other. *Katherine's occupation goes from librarian to journeying antiquarian. See below why for what happened and see previous bullet for what happens next. Totally not a fragment of the whole thing. Not finished at all and I'll likely forgo chaptering entirely for this one. *I haven't forgotten the Mailman War but I've run into some issues with 'where do I want this to go'. Same issue applies to Back to the Mainland. Hell, I'm doubting that title now. *The whole thing in Delinius' moveset with rage had cool-sounding names when I was 16. I'm not 16 anymore, so I'm going to retool the names and descriptions of all that. Probably into something even cheesier via reverse maturity progression. *Other character pages/page concepts that need working on are also gathering dust but they have not been forgotten. So hellcome to well. Hellcome to well, and please like and subscribe. I would make some fitting or funny end comment here but it feels like I'm out of ideas for a lot of things. Includes strategies for making my study not suck, strategies for fighting the suggestions that I should quit this study and just go work. Oh that one is fun. Yeeeees let's quit this even though I've already committed three years to it! And I'm sure whatever I can pick up with my current papers is going to work MARVELLOUSLY to repay the debt. Although a year out of circulation could in theory help, I think in practice it'd be the end of the whole studying thing altogether. Worse still, YouTube is trying to convince me to stop as well with dumb 'success stories' of school dropouts. Yeah buddy, here's the thing. I am stubborn, but I'm not some ambitious smooth-talker that's cheating his way to the top or some shit with online marketing or some other obscure 'lucrative' field. I'm too nice. Welcome to hell. It's cold here.